Ross Douthat

Bush’s Supermajorities

By ROSS DOUTHAT

January 4, 2010

Last week, discussing the filibuster, I wrote that “the Bush tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, and Medicare Part D all passed with Senate supermajorities.” I should have written that the Senate versions of those bills passed with supermajorities (that is, filibuster-proof majorities). The initial Senate vote on the 2001 Bush tax cuts, after some horse-trading with Democrats, was 65-35; the vote on the bill that came back from conference, however, was 58-33. The Senate version of Medicare Part D passed 76-21, but the final version passed 54-44. (Neither bill was filibustered, obviously: The 2001 tax cuts were passed using reconciliation, and in the cloture vote for Medicare Part D, 70 Senators voted yea.)

If you were so inclined, then, you could cite the final vote on both Bush-era bills as exhibits in a bipartisan case against the filibuster, using them to argue that supermajority requirements tend to block legislation no matter who’s in power. But then you’d have to claim that there would have been no Bush tax cut in 2001 without Congressional Republicans’ willingness to use reconciliation, and no Medicare Part D in 2003 if the Democrats had been willing to filibuster the final bill.

That’s possible, obviously. But it seems much more likely that a supermajority requirement would have produced a slightly smaller tax cut — closer to the one that earned those 65 Senate votes, probably — and a slightly different pattern of House-Senate negotiation on prescription drugs. In both counterfactuals, I suspect the bills would have still passed — and what’s more, that their final shape would have vindicated Jay Cost’s suggestion that the filibuster tends to pull legislative efforts toward the center, rather than killing them off entirely.